Is Data Human?

I've always loved Sci-Fi movies and television shows. One of my regulars was "Star Trek: The Next Generation." It had great characters like Captain Picard, Warf, Councilor Troy, "Number One" and Data.

Data was always a personal favorite of mine. He was really nerdy, but in a cool way, I thought. As you know, if you followed the series, he was so intelligent and so human that he was even made an official Star Fleet officer. Still, it was a constant struggle for him to understand the human emotions that he, (with the exception of one memorable plot line,) could never experience. His "Pinocchio Complex" would often keep the plot interesting between action sequences.

We've seen this theme in "The Terminator," "I, Robot," "Bicentennial Man" and others. Non-human leading characters who express pseudo-human qualities that blur the boundary between man and machine. This is a concept that has been perpetuated throughout the entertainment industry for a long, long time.

These are not the first movies to examine the fine line that sometimes seems to exist between humanity and artificial intelligence. Does a machine that relates intelligently and, perhaps even, emotionally have a soul? Is it sentient? Has it consciousness? If something approximates humanity in such a convincing manner, how can you say it's not human? They all ask the same question in different ways: What defines a person?

It's funny, in a non-funny way, that these people seek to obscure the difference between man and machine by saying that if it seems so human, it must be human. Yet, they are the same people who will argue that a baby, in spite of everything about it being human, is nonhuman simply because it is unborn.

Beclouding what qualifies as human is a device used by those wishing to devalue the life of the "undesirable" have used for at least the last century. If you don't know what constitutes life, if life its self is somehow subjective to the prospective of the observer, how can we really say it's wrong to dispose of those lives that don't fit whatever criteria the majority or even an elite minority deems worthwhile? Simply put, we can't!

That, good people, is all pat of the plan. Get rid of those who don't fit and who can't defend themselves. The unborn, the old and feeble, the poor and the uneducated. Who's next?